Robots the size of grains of sand work cooperatively like ants.
Jeong Jae-wi et al.
Swarms of tiny robots guided by magnetic fields can be coordinated to behave like ants, from coming together to form floating rafts to lifting objects hundreds of times their own weight. Microrobots about the size of a grain of sand may one day be able to perform tasks that larger robots cannot, such as piercing blood vessels and delivering drugs to specific locations inside the human body.
Wijeongjae A research team at South Korea’s Hanyang University created a small, cube-shaped robot using epoxy resin and a mold embedded with a magnetic alloy. These tiny magnetic particles allow microrobots to be “programmed” to form various configurations after being exposed to strong magnetic fields at specific angles. The bot can then be controlled by an external magnetic field to perform rotations or other movements. This approach allowed the team to “efficiently and rapidly produce hundreds to thousands of microrobots” with magnetic profiles designed for specific missions, Wie said.
The researchers instructed a swarm of microrobots to cooperatively climb obstacles five times higher than a single microrobot and form rafts that float on water. The robot also demonstrated potential medical applications by transporting pills weighing 2,000 times the weight of an individual through liquid through a clogged tube.
“These magnetic microrobots hold great promise for minimally invasive drug delivery in small, confined spaces,” he says. Dong Xiaoguang A researcher at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee who was not involved in the study. However, microrobots are not yet capable of autonomously navigating complex and narrow spaces such as arteries.
Dong says there are also safety concerns, including the need to coat “potentially toxic” magnetic particles with human-friendly materials. Nonetheless, he said he was optimistic about future medical uses of such microrobots. If safe, robots can “effectively navigate to target disease areas and deliver drugs locally,” making treatments more precise and effective.
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